Brian Steensland is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). His interests include religion, culture, politics, and civic life in contemporary American society. His books include Situating Spirituality: Context, Practice, and Power (Oxford, 2022), co-edited with Jaime Kucinskas and Anna Sun; The New Evangelical Social Engagement (Oxford, 2014), co-edited with Philip Goff; and The Failed Welfare Revolution: America’s Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy (Princeton, 2008), which won the Mary Douglas Prize for cultural sociology and the Distinguished Book Award in political sociology.  His articles include “The Measure of American Religion” (Social Forces, 2000, with co-authors) and “Cultural Categories and the American Welfare State” (American Journal of Sociology, 2006).

Steensland’s current interests revolve around religious pluralism and religious commitment. Supported by a $1.2M grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., he is partnering with the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis on a five-year project about religious parenting.

He serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal for the Social Scientific Study of Religion and has served on Council for the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and as Chair of the Sociology of Religion section for the American Sociological Association. He is a Research Director at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. From 2016-2020, he was Director of IU’s Consortium for the Study of Religion, Ethics, and Society.

Steensland has taught undergraduate courses on sociology of religion, social problems, social theory, and introduction to sociology, and graduate seminars on sociological theory, sociology of religion, cultural analysis, political sociology, and textual analysis. He has twice won Indiana University’s Trustee’s Teaching Award and also received the Edwin H. Sutherland Excellence in Teaching Award.

From 2002 to 2014, Steensland was a professor in the sociology department at Indiana University-Bloomington. He earned his PhD in sociology from Princeton University in 2002.